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Before taking the course "Digital Marketing", honestly, I did not expect to learn so much. I thought that the course would include subjective ideas but no concrete content. However, I then found that I have learned both personal experience from the Professor and guess speakers, and I also have understood more theories. Though some of the theories are still being constructed, I believe that is the trait of digital marketing stuff - never stop evolving.

Now I am confident of delivering strong digital strategy/campaign for my future clients. Five essentials will be taken care in all of my proposals.

1) Storytelling:
Story is the core of every business. A brand should have its own story triggering its business. That can be an incident, a memory or even a tale. No matter what the forms are, the stories are based in "beliefs" which express the brand's philosophy. Therefore, storytelling is the best way to communicate because it can tell your customers who you are. Besides, people love to hear stories so they have weaker defense against stories rather than information. Meaningful stories can arouse consumers' interests and enter their minds to build strong connection with them.

2) Content Marketing:
Compared to storytelling's "who are you", content marketing represents "what can you do for them." Many brands are eager to show customers their products or services. Nevertheless, not all the information is relevant to customers. David Meerman Scott talked about an important idea "Nobody cares about your products (except you)" in his book World Wide Rave, so providing useful information for your customers to access is important for content marketing. Today people use a lot of social media, but that does not mean that brands can always take advantage when they use social media to share information. Sharing relevant information is better than using social media heavily. We can think of what Jay Baer's said, "Content is fire, and social media is gasoline."

3) UX:
User experience is another issue needed to be addressed. The idea can also be divided into 2 parts. a) The interface of website: how do customers feel when they visit or shop on the official websites? Is the interface friendly? Brands should simulate consumers' experience by visiting the websites and testing all the functions to improve user experience. b) The tools consumers use for surfing on the Internet: everything changes fast in digital world. A good brand has strong sense on the society trends. For example, if you want to target young generation, you should have known how mobile is important for them. "Mobile phones are teen's lifelines. It's not that they don't watch TV. But mobile is their first screen." said Pio Schunker, SVP, Integrated Marketing Communications, Coca Cola, NA.

4) Newsjacking:
To attract consumers' attention, brands are faced with severe competition not only from competitors but also from other media. For efficient purpose, consumers tend to select important information to process. Therefore, watching out important news and embedding messages in the news help brands expose in the spotlight. If products' attributes can be combines with similar news, that will bring the best effect since your consumers are focused.

5) KPIs:
About a century ago, John Wanamaker said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." The famous saying illustrates how difficult it was to reach target by using traditional advertising. The good news is that we can easily track the advertising effects by digital marketing tools if we design the digital campaign well. The question is what we can measure and why. For a new brand, people's awareness may be more meaningful than sales so sign-ups can be a primary KPI. On the contrary, an existing brand may focus on its sales so how to achieve the highest conversion rate by various offers is an issue.  

I believe that examining the 5 points above is necessary for successful digital strategies/campaigns, but that is not enough. The number of digital media keeps growing in an unprecedented speed and the situation of digital world changes dramatically, so I remind myself of being involved in the digital world and never stop thinking better solutions. Only by doing these, I can be an excellent digital marketer.